May 16th.

Everybody seems a little weary. Jaded. A little bit anxious because the Coronavirus cannot be tamed. A little bit sick and tide of the rules and regulations; the self-isolation, the social distancing, the lock-down. A little bit afraid when things start to ease up, when we take steps towards that little bit lost, largely remembered, normal.

Like so many people, days and dates often elude me in this time of pandemic. So I surprised myself this morning when I saw, and registered, the date.

May 16th.

Once upon a time, 58 years ago today, three adults got into a hospital lift together, A nun also got in. The group of three – my mother, her mother-in-law, and my father’s oldest brother, who was a priest – exchanged pleasantries with the nun, who then enquired of my mother the name of the patient they were visiting. When she heard the reply, the nun gasped, told my mother she was a poor, poor, thing as were we the poor, poor, little children and promised that she would pray for us all, including my poor, poor, father.

The trio left the lift at the floor where the specialist’s room was. All pretence, all hope had drained from them but they remained upright and silent as they found their way to a waiting room. I imagine my mother having the heels that would click as they touched the shining linoleum along the hallway floor. In the waiting room I think they each would have stared ahead as if alone, lost in thought, and fear. There was that lash of shock too.

My father had not been well. I don’t know for how long this had been the case before he saw the local doctor, whether he had been a little bit unwell for a long time or a lot unwell for a short time. His problems concerned mainly his bowel; we were small children and these things were not discussed with, or near, us. We knew he was gone to hospital, We knew he was having an operation “to see what the matter is.”

We visited him in hospital and our aunt took us into the corridor for wheelchair racing. Our dad came home and my birthday party had to be cancelled. I got in bed with him and showed him my presents and he said he was very very sorry about my party and upsetting me so much and I felt bad and said it was alright. He got a bit better, got out of bed and sat by the fire, went back to work a shorter week, recuperated, started the cycle over again.

Nobody told the younger three children – “the little girls” – that he was dying. Nobody told him that either. It was the times, the belief that someone might just give up altogether if they knew the truth. He called to my mother a few days out from his death and she left the kitchen and the orange cake she was mixing to go to him and he asked her then, “I’m not going to get better, am I?” And she told him the truth and wept, and asked if he’d guessed and he said he had noticed that no-one had congratulated him after the surgery.

My mother never made an orange cake again. At some stage the grief by association must have passed, but, still.

The specialist came for the trio in the waiting room. He sat them down and sat himself down and proceeded to dash any shred of hope that may have survived the nun in the lift. There was cancer to be found and it was everywhere. The story, eventually told us after his death, omitted the colostomy. There was nothing to be done so my father was stitched up again and returned to the ward. There was a belief at the time that if it wasn’t bad enough to have cancer, it was worse once the air got to it. It was then out of control.

Somebody asked the question. How long?

And my mother would always tell this bit of the story with wonder, and admiration. The doctor had replied that he thought, all things considered, about six months. “Do you know,” she would say, as if by now we didn’t, “he was exactly right. Six months from that day until November 16. Truly unbelievable. He was a very good doctor of course.”